Companies operating refineries and petrochemical plants typically face tough challenges in today's environment. These challenges can include eroding financial margins, increasingly complex technologies, a reduction in workforce experience levels, and constantly changing environmental regulations.
Furthermore, as feed and product prices become more volatile, operators often find it more difficult to make the operating decisions that can optimize their financial margin. This volatility may be unlikely to ease in the foreseeable future; however, it can represent economic potential to those companies that can quickly identify and respond to market opportunities as they arise.
Pressures from capital markets generally force operating companies to continually increase the return on existing assets. In response, catalyst, adsorbent, equipment, and control system suppliers develop more complex systems that can increase asset performance. Maintenance and operations of these advanced systems generally requires increased skill levels that can be difficult to develop, maintain, and transfer given the time pressures and limited resources of today's technical personnel. This means that these increasingly complex systems are not always operated to their highest potential. In addition, when existing assets are operated close to and beyond their design limits, reliability concerns and operational risks can increase.
Plant operators typically respond to above challenges with one or more of several strategies, such as, for example, availability risk reduction, working the value chain and continuous economic optimization. Availability risk reduction generally places an emphasis on achieving adequate plant operations as opposed to maximizing economic performance. Working the value chain typically places an emphasis on improving the match of feed and product mix with asset capabilities and market demands. Continuous economic optimization often employs tools, systems and models to continuously monitor and bridge the economic and operational gaps in plant performance.
There are multiple levels of gaps (or performance deficits) that refinery operators typically experience:
1) Events or “Lost Opportunities” Gap
Most refinery operators can sufficiently track the cost/value of unplanned events in their refineries: unplanned shutdowns, equipment availability problems, etc. The value associated with these gaps is generally large, but the duration is normally short. Well-operated refineries can keep these events to a minimum through effective process and mechanical reliability programs.
2) Backcasting Gap
Some refineries focus on a backcasting (historical) gap in which the operator compares the monthly refinery production plan against the actual achieved operations, and conducts an analysis to understand and resolve the cause(s) for any gap(s). This is typically done on a monthly basis. Refinery operators can often uncover substantial economic improvement if they resolve the root causes for deviation from refinery production process plans.
However, when root causes are embedded in poor process performance, they are often difficult to identify. This historical backcasting analysis also can be costly in that it leaves issues unidentified and un-resolved until the end of the month. As an example only, a 1% debit in octane-barrel production from a 30,000 BPD reforming unit can be worth $530,000 over a month (based upon a $0.60/oct-bbl valuation). Early identification of this gap and resolution of the problems can avoid significant profit losses. It is important to maintain continuous and consistent levels of desired performance when optimizing a particular process based on various plant process models to ensure consistent and viable results.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved tuning system for operators to respond to these challenges by utilizing a strategy of economic optimization which employs tools, systems and models to monitor and bridge the economic and operational gaps in plant performance.